Along the way, the two sisters find love, adventure and betrayal. The eldest and youngest children turn into indulgent twats, and the burden of caring for them falls onto the middle siblings Conder and Ella.īut when Cinder gets a job at the palace as a maid, she becomes involved in magical intrigue involving the evil prince, and also manages to pull her sister Ella into it. Their mother, devastated by her husband's abandonment, retreats to her spinning wheel, leaving her daughters to fend for themselves. Soon their father becomes discontented and eventually leaves the house.

Until the evil Prince comes to visit them one night and sows poisonous seeds in the father's mind. Cinder and Ella, along with their parents and two sisters live happily in the village of Willow Top. The idea behind the novel is interesting, but the execution is severely lacking. After this happened, the mother announced that birthdays would no longer be celebrated in the house. The eldest daughter slapped her very hard across the face and the third daughter ran to her room, her cheek stinging and red. So the third daughter grabbed a handful of the cake and smeared it into the hair of her older sister. The older sister was relentlessly throwing a tantrum because she wanted to cut the cake. One day, one of the daughters was about to cut a cake for somebody's birthday. They would often say nasty things to each other, hurt each other, or simply not speak to one another for weeks at a time. Contention was now a constant guest in the house and the occasional, small quarrels between the sisters turned to fits of rage.

The end result was havoc in the place of happiness. The writing style is all mixed up, part traditional bardic narration and part simplified children's narrative. I still can't make up my mind whether it's meant to be an MG-level read, or YA.

Cinder and ella book 3